Framingham Heart Study

The Framingham Heart Study is one of the most important epidemiological studies in the annals of American medicine. Its impact on the study of cardiovascular diseases is particularly important: Much of what is now common knowledge about heart disease, such as the effects of smoking, diet, exercise, and aspirin, can be traced back to the Framingham study. Most important, the study has played a key role in influencing physicians to place greater emphasis on preventing, detecting, and treating cardiovascular disease risk factors in their earliest stages.

In 1948, Framingham, a small town in eastern Massachusetts, was selected as the site of a long-term medical study of heart disease and stroke. The project was initiated under the direction of the National Heart Institute, now the National Heart, Lung, and Blood [Page 400]Institute (NHLBI). Through a contract with the NHLBI, researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine have played an important role in the Framingham Heart Study since 1971.

More than 50 years later, that follow-up study has yielded an incredible amount of information about heartdiseasesandtheriskfactorsthatcanleadto them. The original cohort of the Framingham Heart Study included two thirds of the adult population of Framingham, with ages ranging from 30 to 62 years in 1948. The study was designed to track health information on men and women without signs of heart disease. Every 2 years, people enrolled in the study submitted to dozens of medical tests and answered detailed questions about their personal habits. Over the years, researchers recorded who got heart disease and who did not and studied the connections between disease and the data that had been collected. The two groups thus formed were statistically analyzed and compared.

Originally, researchers enrolled 5,209 Framingham residents (known as the Original Cohort), some of whom are still participating more than 50 years later. In 1970, the study added 5,124 new recruits, referred to as the Offspring Cohort, who were children of the original study group and their spouses. A Third Generation Cohort consisting of individuals who had at least one parent in the Offspring Cohort was recruited beginning in 2001, and 4,095 participants had enrolled in this cohort by June 2005. More recently, 500 members of Framingham's minority community have been recruited to participate in the Omni Study that was initiated and has continued to recruit people with the purpose of determining whether the risk factors associated with disease continue to be the same that were identified in the two previous cohorts.

The findings of the Framingham Heart Study have produced a revolution in preventive medicine and changed the way the medical community and the general public view the origins of disease. More than 1,000 papers based on the Framingham data have appeared in important scientific reviews and have inspired many clinical trials that have been crucial to understand how to manage heart disease and how to control major risk factors. In addition to its great contributions in the area of heart research, the Framingham Study has provided very useful evidence to investigate cancer, stroke, osteoporosis, arthritis, dementia, diabetes, eye disease, and the genetic patterns of many other common diseases.

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